Regenerative Sustainability: Homo Ecologicus and the New Enlightenment

‘Sustainable DevelopmentSustainable development’ has become an extremely noisy field. Strategies for achieving sustainabilitySustainability remain a contested terrain. The dominant approach, the ‘Socio-technologicalSocio-technological paradigmParadigm’ advanced by the growth-driven agenda, is a top-down, techno-managerial approach to incremental policy reforms and solving the environmentalEnvironmental problems by ‘doing less harm’ through technical quick-fixes. This is, at best, a shallow approach to ‘weak sustainabilitySustainability’. In the first section, this chapter moves in the orbit of a critic of the anthropocentric worldview of ‘ModernityModernity’—rooted in Baconian scienceBaconian science, Cartesian dualismCartesian dualism, and the Newtonian mechanistic constructionNewtonian mechanistic construction of the universe as the foundation of progress—at the heart of the problem of the AnthropoceneAnthropocene. It then proceeds to argue that, in contrast, ‘Regenerative SustainabilityRegenerative sustainability’, based on the emerging ‘Socio-ecologicalSocio-ecological paradigmParadigm’, is an approach that fundamentally changes our anthropocentric approach to natureNature and the future with a focus on the longue durée. The socialSocial-ecological paradigmParadigm is very provocative in the sense that it gives us a new orientation, based on an alternative epistemological paradigmParadigm, for a fundamental change in our anthropocentric valuesValue and attitudes vis-à-vis natureNature through advancing an ecological worldview. Regenerative SustainabilityRegenerative sustainability conceives of natureNature as a moralMoral and spiritual force, a complex living system, and promotes an alternative biocentric ethicEthics involving new forms of socialSocial learning and action toward transformative spaces for the creation of alternative futures. The chapter traces the roots of eco-centrismEco-centrism in the worldviews and cultural practices of non-Western and indigenousIndigenous societies, which have been lost to Western modernityModernity. Regenerative SustainabilityRegenerative sustainability, nurtured by the new enlightenment as part of the ‘second ModernityModernity’, calls for the ‘recovery’ of those lost philosophiesPhilosophy, ontologies, and cosmologies and their relationalities and sensibilities, and integrates them into our ecosophyEcosophy as the compass for the twnty-first century. If the first modernityModernity brought the Industrial Revolution and gave birth to Homo economicusHomo economicus, the second modernityModernity is bringing an ecological revolution with Homo ecologicusHomo ecologicus outshining Homo economicusHomo economicus.